engleski

Success stories in restoration actions across coastal-marine ecosystems: The potential for synergies

Restoration actions are crucial to enhance the recovery of degraded ecosystems and to speed up the return to their original state. The increase of restoration actions in marine systems highlights the need to provide specific recommendations to prioritise and improve restoration strategies that make the practices more effective. A review of 498 studies on active restoration in the marine environment published in the last 25 years was carried out at global scale. We assessed how, where, at which spatial and temporal scales, and under which socio-ecological settings restoration studies have been carried out in order to reveal determinants of success. Results show that restoration efforts across coastal habitats are increasing, especially for seagrasses and coral reefs, but never approached at the ecosystem-level. Targets, methods, response variables, and standards are very heterogeneous. Among the factors considered in the review, habitat, human impact intensity, biogeographic realm, and methods of restoration emerged as good determinants of restoration success. Short project duration, relatively small restoration areas, and lack of controls and knowledge of baselines are still limiting factors for deriving generalities. Finally, restorations rarely consider the link with ecosystem services nor future challenges linked to global change, thus impairing evaluation of benefits and long-term success stories. Marine restoration science needs more robust approaches leading to the development of best practices (e.g. protocols, monitoring of the effects, reasons for failure) to be applied at spatial and temporal scales so as to answer to present and future disturbance regimes.

marine restoration, marine ecosystems, global review, restoration success

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